SEO for Your Real Estate Website – Good luck with that

I get real estate agents and brokers calling me every week because they want to get on the first page of Google for the terms, “(city name) real estate’ or “(city name) homes for sale”. There was a time when really good SEO techs could make that happen, but now, especially for the real estate industry the opportunities for page one search results organically have decreased substantially.

In the past there were always 10 organic positions open in the Google search engine results plus Adwords. Now you are competing against your marketing vendors like Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, Realtor.com and homes.yahoo.com. In major markets you are lucky to find any independent real estate brokerages or individual agent sites anywhere in the organic search results.

Through the proper strategies you can work to show up in image search results, video results and even the “Hot Seven” on the first page of Google. However when somebody calls you up selling cheap SEO they are stealing your money. I charge a minimum of $2500 per month for SEO with no guarantees.

Frankly, when somebody calls me for SEO, I suggest two books for them to purchase to learn how to do it themselves:

While deciding on whether you are going to buy these books, ask yourself if you want positioning or leads? If you want leads, take your SEO money and engage in Pay-Per-Click advertising in Google and Facebook. Beware though, as you could piss away all of your PPC money in one day which is why you want to consider hiring a PPC manager, which we also provide.

One way to get link backs is to register for every possible social media and real estate organization that gives you a profile. Yest that includes the vendors mentioned above.

At the end of the day, while it is possible, if you are new to the web, it is highly unlikely, no matter how much you are willing to pay, that you will wind up on page one in the organics for the larger cities. Smaller markets is another story.

If you have marketing money set aside, spend it on leads or website traffic. You may have a crappy site that does not convert which means if you spent money on traffic you may have wasted that money.

If you want me to look at what you have now or just to review your real estate marketing plan, please go to this Internet Marketing Review page to start the process. (BTW, that was an anchor text link back.)